#27 Add codriver voice

[Andrei]

It would probably benefit the in-game immersion if some maps featured a co-driver, reading pace notes to the player.

In theory this should be relatively easy to implement in code; the map creator would have to do more work by adding co-driver "checkpoints" with information about what he should say. These checkpoints would be invisible to the player but the co-driver would speak when they are reached.

[qubodup]

Games of this genre usually have GUI signs and voice, so that would be a possible first step without the need for sound files at first.

Seeing that trigger doesn't have walls or a pre-destined paths, other than what is suggested by the map design and check points, it's much harder to be sure which direction the driver is driving from/towards.

Perhaps something like:

if driving direction is out of bounds of the direction of the next "invisible" checkpoint by 90° or more then
info "wrong way"
elseif driving direction is out of bounds of the firection of the next "invisible" checkpoint by 30° or more then
do nothing
else
info correct_path_info

hopefully the attched image illustrates this idea clearly.

Now that I've drwan it, it seems very complicated though. I imagine similar games don't care about the driving direction but their level design makes it unlikely to be on the wrong heading when checking a codriver-info-checkpoint.

[Onsemeliot]

@Iwan: What you propose sounds like a surprisingly good concept. It probably would need some kind of calculation in which direction the next guidance-checkpoint lies and derive the angles from this vector.

Maybe because I have very poor quality speakers I use Trigger Rally without sound enabled. In my opinion the noises are mostly annoying. I also see difficulties in implementing this feature since I have done many maps where you can actually drive alternative routes. What should the codriver suggest when there is more than one possible option?

I also did quite a few very long maps with many checkpoints on a maze-like layout. This would make implementing this feature on all maps a lot of serious work. Errors would be very frustrating for the players. So everything would need to be done very carefully and tested rigurously.

I'm sure in many of my maps you would actually be able to drive the same passage in different directions without the consequence of losing the race. I can't imagine how we could deal with that.

Of course I could work on those maps to take away such possibilities but over all I feel this would be more of a limitation than an advantage for gameplay.

An other possibility would be to have some kind of indication which maps do support codriver guidance. In this case we could introduce this feature only where it would work.

[Andrei]

Now that I've drwan it, it seems very complicated though. [...]

Indeed, it is complicated. Your ideas are good for the future. For now let's keep it simple and stupid. "Get at checkpoint, codriver speaks." Even so there's a lot of room for implementation screwups and difficulties.

An other possibility would be to have some kind of indication which maps do support codriver guidance. In this case we could introduce this feature only where it would work.

Codriver voice is meant to be optional for map-makers and therefore backward-compatible: maps won't be forced to support it. So if the maps don't contain codriver checkpoints then it means there's no codriver.